“Since two months ago.”
“Where is she?”
“Florida,” I tell him. “Shadow Key. That’s where I’m going.”
“I’ve never been to an island before,” Marcus says.
I look down at his hand. I reach for his fingers and squeeze. His skin has the same soft feeling I remember from childhood.
Soon there is another river, wide and glossy with ice. A light fog hovers over the river and it looks like the water is breathing. The trees on the banks are stooped and gray. They have an ancient way about them.
I see a distant bridge and wonder when’s the last time somebody jumped.
“What about you? Where are you trying to end up?”
“Nowhere,” he says.
*
In Dayton, it becomes clear that all along this bus has been going in the wrong direction, that it has no intention of taking me to Birmingham. I go up front to talk to the driver and he tells me this bus is going east and has always been going east and he doesn’t know where I got my ideas about Birmingham. I ask about the next stop and he tells me it’s Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, unless I want to be let out on the side of the road, in which case he will be perfectly happy to oblige.
I have a feeling this driver does not believe in existence affirmations.
“We’re going to Pennsylvania,” I tell Marcus when I return to my seat, and I am squeezed tight by the fear that the forces of nature are trying to drag me back to Massachusetts, to Somerville and the Stop & Shop, and away from my mother.
It takes us three hours to get out of Ohio, to cross over the Pennsylvania state line. We pass signs for Pittsburgh, a city divided by a river, and after a while the highway tapers into a narrow road bordered by forest. I look into the trees and see dark darting things through the branches. This road leads us to a town where the streetlights are burned out and the power lines are drooping and the earth beneath the sidewalks has swelled, pushing up the concrete squares so they look like rising waves. We pass a block of little houses with rusted awnings and crumbling foundations. White sheets with black x’s cover windows. Yellow notices hang from doors.
The bus stops in the middle of the road. The sky is a swamp of gray. I look toward the front and see that the driver has a map of his own. He is frowning and turning it this way and that. After a while he takes out a cell phone and clicks around. Eventually he puts away the map and the phone and we start moving again, but now there is no mistaking that we are lost.
We pass smoking hillsides, as though great fires are raging behind the rises. At a stop sign, I look to the right, to the road that extends east, and see that the asphalt is rippled and brown weeds have shot up between the cracks. A fallen tree blocks the path. The roots are black and frozen. White steam, thick as the hillside smoke, pours out of the metal grates in the ground.
We pass signs that read DANGER: TOXIC GASES PRESENT and WARNING: GROUND PRONE TO SUDDEN COLLAPSE. Outside, dusk is falling.
“My god,” the woman sitting behind us says. “We’re in Centralia.”
Marcus and I twist around in our seats and ask what she means by Centralia and the woman tells us that this used to be a mining town but many years ago the landfill caught fire and the fire spread through the network of mines underground. Those underground fires couldn’t be put out and there were problems with poisonous gases and sinkholes, just like those signs said. She stabs at the air above her. The town was condemned; the underground fires never stopped burning. This is not damage done by the sickness. This we did all on our own.
“Centralia,” the woman says again. “It’s famous, this place.” She touches her window. She has a faraway look in her eye.
I am terrified by the idea of sinkholes, of being consumed by the earth.
Marcus and I sit back down in our seats and look at each other and I wish one of us knew what to do. I keep watch through the window and when we pass another block of condemned houses I think I see a woman standing on an icy lawn, waving at us through the smoke. She is wearing some kind of soft wrap or maybe a bathrobe and she is barefoot like that one pilgrim I saw from the Dining Hall window in the Hospital.
“Look,” I say to Marcus, but the bus is moving and the smoke is getting thicker and there is no way to tell if she is still there, if she was ever there at all.
The other passengers start objecting to the driver’s course of action. The ones who have been asleep wake and open their mouths like animals trying to lose a strange taste. When they look out the windows, at the hot smoking ground, their muscles shed the looseness of sleep. They grab the backs of seats, knock on windows, call up to the driver. “Go left!” “Go right!” “Turn around!” “Get us out of here!”
The driver hunches over the wheel. The bus starts going faster.
We roll onto an unpaved road. A clunking sound and we’re back to slow.
White dust blooms around us, luminous in the headlights. I smell rotten eggs and feel heat coming up through the floor.
“The other way!” someone shouts from the back of the bus.
The driver sends us in reverse, the tires crunching over gravel, and starts down another road. By then we are surrounded by nothing but night and all the things that night is capable of hiding.